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-Jon Levell wrote
> Ben Meadowcroft wrote:
> >
> > This kind of presentational information would be best done
> using CSS
> > and its "graceful" degradation (theory and practice may clash).
> > Browsers that understand the rules can apply them while those that
> > don't
>
> I agree CSS is the best place for the presentational part of this
> although it may be necessary to introduce new HTML to allow us to have
> things to style. The actual CSS mechanism you gave as an example (with
> columns in the head and body naturally the same width and the body
> having and overflow set only works in very simple cases, if I
> dynamically change the contents (and resize) a cell in the table body
> then the columns will not line up with the head.
I believe most browsers that support scrolling table bodies using CSS keep
the header column widths in line with the width of the body columns (at
least when the table body is only scrolling vertically). For example this
simple test case (included at end of message) does this in firefox. The
CSS rendering engine handles the dynamic resizing of columns.
> And once you start trying to keep columns as well as rows fixed then a
> complete rethink of the approach is needed as the "static" cells do
> need to scroll - just in one direction.
>
> > CSS doesn't allow this level of control using column selectors
> > unfortunately. See
> > http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-CSS2-19980512/tables.html#q4 for what
> > you can do.
>
> I know that what I want to do is not currently possible in a simple
> manner. I'm hoping that this new spec will change that situation,
> either by extending thead/colgroup tags with new CSS or by introducing
> new tags and classes or...
I think that the best course for implementing this would be through CSS as
what you are discussing is a presentation level feature. I think it would
be best discussed in www-style@w3.org
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/ rather than in this forum.
> I'm sorry - I'm a little bit confused by your email, you eloquently
> show how to do it in very simple cases using existing HTML/CSS but you
> say that what I'm trying to do can't currently easily be done, but I
> know this as otherwise I wouldn't be posting asking for the new spec
> to help.
>
> Sorry if I missed your point entirely!
In retrospect I wasn't that clear was I! Basically I was making the point
that the correct layer to do this kind of presentational effect is the
presentation language (CSS). Therefore adding presentational mark-up to
HTML within this spec to achieve the effects you want isn't the right
route to take (in my opinion, maybe others disagree?). I think that
Extending CSS to support this would be better (essentially introducing the
concept of columns as first class citizens).
I hope that made my point clearer.
Ben
***Example***
Example of scrolling tbody with support for static header, footer and
resizing columns. Click the button to resize the first column.
Simple resizing table